A web portal or links page is a website that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. Typically, a portal page is displayed as a collection of non-overlapping portlet windows, where each portlet window displays a portlet. Portlets are pluggable user interface software components that are managed and displayed in a web portal. Portlets produce fragments of markup code that are aggregated into a portal. Hence, a portlet (or collection of portlets) resembles a web-based application that is hosted in a portal. Some examples of portlet applications are email, weather reports, discussion forums, and news.
A web content management system is a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage website content with relative ease. In a web content management system, the design and layout of the web portals are separated from the content displayed within a website. This allows web content authors to create the content for your website without having to understand how to build a website. Some typical features of a web content management system include versioning which allows authorized editors to retrieve previous versions and to continue work from a selected point. Versioning is useful for content that changes over time and requires updating, but it may be necessary to go back to or reference a previous copy. Also, a web content management system may syndicate the web page to different subscribers.
However, by separating the designing of the portal page from the creating of the content of the portal page, there is not currently a means for coordinating the creating and updating of the design/layout of the portal page with its associated content in the web content management system that syndicates the portal page to different subscribers. For example, if the portal page is to be renamed, then you can change the name of the portal page that is defined in the portal database, but there is not currently a means for automatically renaming its associated content on the portal page. In another example, suppose that a portal page has been published with a typographical mistake. While one can revert to a prior version without the typographical mistake in the web content management system since the web content management system stores prior versions, such a change cannot automatically be made on the published portal page on the portal side.